The HumansReview

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Up the very long ladder.

By Jason Ocampo

The Humans is a puzzle platform game that's decidedly more puzzle than platform, and it's a puzzling game in its own right. That's because while it's designed for gamers three and up, the difficulty of the puzzles may confound the younger set. At the same time, the sheer repetitiveness of the action will dull out the older set. The result is a game that probably works best for slightly older kids, the kind with nearly unlimited amounts of patience.

In The Humans, you must guide a tribe of caveman ancestors through a series of platforming puzzles, with obstacles ranging from gaping chasms that must be leapt over, hostile tribe members who must be avoided or dealt with, and even roaming dinosaurs. It's that last bit that irks me, as dinosaurs and humans never interacted with one another (there's about a 65 million year gap between the two), and this is the kind of game where impressionable tykes will get the wrong ideas reinforced.

Platforming in the Stone Age.

Anyway, the goal in each puzzle is to basically get your caveman to a hut, or retrieve some crucial bit of technology (like a rope), or to free a squarish caveman lass from the hostile tribe. You only get five lives per puzzle, and if a caveman misses a jump or gets eaten by a dinosaur you use up a life. Once all five lives are exhausted you have to restart the entire puzzle.

Where it gets annoying is the nature of the puzzles. The difficulty translates into a lot of trial-and-error as you figure out the process of events required to solve it. For instance, you might retrieve a spear early on which you can use to kill a dinosaur, but then you'll discover that you actually needed to spare the dinosaur because you needed the spear later on to kill a hostile tribal member. In that case, you'll have to restart the level and try again. It's also way too easy to misjudge a jump or accidentally walk off an edge (you usually get a warning animation of the caveman trying to keep his balance, but certain edges lack that warning so the caveman suddenly plummets to his death). It's also way too easy to accidentally throw away a critical item by hitting the wrong button. All this adds up to some frustration and a lot of restarting till you get the process of events down perfectly.

You can also switch between different cavemen, so it's a matter of figuring out where each of them needs to be during certain parts of a puzzle. One might need to stand on a switch, while another has to be in a position to toss down a key item to another, while another might dangle a rope for others to climb. You can even assemble them together to form a human ladder to reach otherwise inaccessible cases. But it's annoying when you have to, say, get all of them to the hut safely. This translates into you having to repeat a platform pattern over and over and over (and over) again in some cases. And if you mess up, you might have to restart the entire process from scratch to get it right.

Navigate this.

The game consists of eight different worlds composed of 10 levels each, and each level will probably take 10 to 15 minutes to figure out, so there's a fair bit of gameplay here if you have the patience and grit to grind it out. The presentation values are rather spare, though. The game has a cute look to it, but there's no way to adjust the gameplay resolution, and the graphics themselves don't look that much more advanced to the Donkey Kong games on the old Super Nintendo. At least that means the game will run on pretty much anything. The audio itself mainly consists of a few catchy themes that repeat themselves through each level, with the occasional dinosaur growl and sound effect.

The Verdict

The Humans is a game that doesn't quite know what audience to go for. The platform action will alienate fans of pure puzzle games, and if the PC has anything it's no shortage of great puzzle games. On the flip side, the action lacks the excitement or the pace of a pure platforming game. And while it's packed with some challenging puzzles, it's also packed with an equal amount of repetitiveness.